But thankfully all was not lost — in fact nothing ended up being lost at all, thanks to a free GPL app called PhotoRec.

I’m not at all sure how PhotoRec works on OS X or Windows; on Linux it’s a command-line app, available through most package managers as part of a bigger suite called TestDisk. Once installed, launching it is as easy as typing the following command into a terminal window:

sudo photorec

Using PhotoRec is just a matter of navigating through the text prompts. I wasn’t able to recover anything the first time I ran it due to a pebkac issue; paying closer attention to the existing format on my SD card got every single missing photo safely restored to a folder on my desktop hard drive.

If you ask me PhotoRec is a life-saver worth almost any price, but as an added bonus it’s absolutely free to download and use. You can also make a donation to the author if you like; I just did. 😎

Oh, and in case you were interested in what PhotoRec recovered, it’s all been uploaded to Flickr for posterity…

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2 comments:

Funny coincidence, I had a similar problem with my Christmas pictures. My camera somehow glitched and I went from having lots of pictures to 0. The camera wanted to reformat but I did not reformat. I remembered using photorec a year or two ago and I had to dig it up again. Since I am not very good at the command line it took me a while to create an image of the cf card and then use photrec to recover the images. But in the end I got all my pictures back. Another holiday miracle (thanks to open source). Thanks for the reminder to donate, this is the second time this tool saved the day for me.